Mind reading video reconstruction from lab of Jack Gallant, UC Berkeley neuroscientist
The latest episode of “Prime: Cuts” could easily be the premise of a Hollywood science fiction movie. Except this science is real, and it’s happening at UC Berkeley.
Neuroscientist Jack Gallant and his team have done what many thought impossible – literally read someone’s mind.
Using advanced brain imaging, researchers can now track what a subject’s brain sees while watching a movie and translate it from the mind to digital video. Talk about someone getting inside someone’s head!
After weeks of leaks, rumors and speculation it has been officially announced that the Higgs boson has been further cornered into a very narrow sliver of mass around 125GeV by independent results from both the CMS and ATLAS detectors. This is consistent with the Standard Model and previous postulates made before the acquisition of humanity’s most powerful particle accelerator.
Is this the first evidence of the Higgs boson? It could well be, perhaps. But it is still not yet a discovery.
Why?
What do these mean?
What do they show?
And how did thousands of scientists get to this point in the search for the Higgs boson?
In this UCTV video exclusive, UC San Diego Physics Professor Vivek Sharma, director of Higgs research for the CMS detector, explains the massive efforts to discover the Higgs Boson using the LHC at CERN.
Since the search began in March 2010, I have been fortunate (very fortunate) to be able to conduct an unprecedented series of exclusive interviews with Vivek Sharma; UC San Diego Professor of Physics and director of Higgs research for the CMS, or Compact Muon Solenoid detector.
He is also one of two people responsible for combining all results from both the CMS and ATLAS detectors – both involving teams of University of California physicists.
In excerpts from some of these interviews Professor Sharma, ok, Vivek, shares his insights from his unique perspective as one of the key figures at the very heart of this gargantuan effort. He provides a detailed, comprehensive but clear and accessible layman’s guide to how this massive team of researchers conducted the science and produced these results, what they look for, what they see, how they (may have) cornered the Higgs, and why they do what they do.
You will be able to understand what this shows, and why it is no longer evidence for the Higgs boson.
Not the Higgs. Why?
And you will be able to understand why this could be evidence for the Higgs boson.
Evidence of the Higgs boson?
You will also understand what the seemingly all-too-complex “Brazilian Flag” (above, apologies to Brazil) states so eloquently about hundreds of trillions of proton-proton collision events, putting them all in terms of the chances that what we are seeing might finally be evidence of the “God Particle”.
But more importantly, you will get a sense of why Vivek, and collectively, we, sift through this chatter and noise to find the signal of the Higgs boson, a signal that speaks to something that has always been, and will always remain, at the core of each of us.
On the new program “Health Matters: Your Own Personal Brain Map,” host David Granet interviewed Dr. Jacopo Annese, director of The Brain Observatory at UC San Diego. Dr. Annese is working on a “Digital Brain Library” that uses advanced neuroimaging technologies to create digital models of the human brain at cellular resolution. Sounds like pretty standard scientific research, right? Not quite.
What makes Dr. Annese’s work unique is that he also studies — and ideally gets to know — the person behind the brain. With this information, he offers an unprecedented holistic perspective on this complex organ.
Bishop Spangler, 1932-2011
Dr. Annese’s Digital Brain Library relies on generous brain donations from community members who want to have a role in discovering how disease and aging affect the brain. San Diego resident Bishop Spangler was one of these people.
Bishop passed away on June 12, 2011 after living with GIST (gastrointestinal stromal tumor) for nine years. In the following paragraphs, his wife Bettie Spangler tells us about her husband, why he felt compelled to donate his brain to Dr. Annese, and how the donation experience profoundly affected Bishop and the entire Spangler family during his final days.
Can you tell us a little bit about your husband?
Bishop Spangler was born in 1932 in a rural area of Southwest Virginia into a farming family of seven children. His family had a proud, rich history of helping settle a community named Meadows of Dan. Growing up, he learned about integrity, helping your neighbors, working as a team, doing deals with a “hand shake,” making your own music, barn dancing, and church. He learned about determination if you wanted to accomplish anything, and the importance of the environment for raising crops and live stock. After high school he found a college in Kentucky where he could go and work his way through and, four years later, he graduated from Berea College with his B.A. degree majoring in physics. He went on to the University of Pittsburgh on a teaching assistant program and earned a Masters in Mathematics, and later his PhD also in Mathematics. He married and later moved to San Diego where he worked in the aerospace industry and raised a family. Eventually, Bishop left the aerospace industry and became an entrepreneur. He loved to “wheel and deal” so he became a real estate broker where he could use many of his gifts/talents/passions. His goal was to always try to help people “stretch in order to obtain their dreams.”
How did your family become involved in the brain library project?
Bishop read an article in the newspaper toward the end of May about the Brain Observatory and the work that Dr. Annese was doing. He showed me the article after he had made the phone call to the paper asking for someone to call him, as he would like to be a donor. He told me that he wanted to give his brain to this project after he died and would I make sure it happened? I said that I did not want to do that for myself, but if that is what he wanted to do, then I would do all I could do to make it happen. He told his children about his decision and they supported him, as we all recognized this as a Bishop thing.
Can you tell us about the experience?
On May 25, 2011 I received a call from Dr. Annese giving me some information about the project. I told him he would need to talk to my husband and he offered to come to our home the next day. Bishop insisted on getting dressed and coming downstairs to meet Dr. Annese, along with our daughter and son. He was ready to sign whatever papers necessary as he knew his time was short and he wanted to take care of business. He was now a brain donor! Dr. Annese was always kind and considerate about not adding pressure or pushing Bishop for more. He would always tell him what was happening during the MRI studies and asking if he felt like doing more. When Bishop got tired he would tell him…no more. At one time the whole family came into the bedroom where Bishop was talking about his early history and the grandchildren asked to sit in. It was fine with Dr. Annese as long as we were quiet. He looked around the room with some on the bed and others on the floor spread out and said, “It looks like camping,” and everyone felt at ease. One of our granddaughters said, “Witnessing Gampa relive key moments of his life through Jacopo’s interviews and knowing that it would be used in support of something he deeply cared about was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.”
Why did your husband want to donate his brain?
Bishop wanted to leave something he could be remembered by—a kind of legacy. He also wanted to leave something that might help humanity in the future. One of our granddaughters said it best, “It made perfect sense since he marked his life with a desire to make a difference and an ongoing quest for deeper understanding about the mysteries of earth and spirituality.”
How did his decision to participate impact his end-of-life experience?
A few days before he died, we were all sitting around in the bedroom listening to him and Dr. Annese talk, when our friend and minister and his wife came in. Introductions were made and then Bishop pointed to Dr. Annese and told our minister, “This man saved my life.” Meaning, he had given him hope that he would live on into the future through this project, and he would be able to contribute something that might help humanity and the scientific community. He lived to accomplish whatever he could give to Dr. Annese for his program.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Dr. Annese kept all of the promises he had made. He told me he would be with Bishop at the end and he would arrange everything needed to accomplish what Bishop indicated he wanted to do with his brain after he died. He was very clear in describing the project to us and to share the goals and objectives that he hoped to accomplish. He never pushed us in making any decisions or to keep appointments if it was not convenient. He also came to the Celebration Of Life service and gave support to all the family. By this time, we all considered him part of our family. We still are in contact. He has a kindness and a bedside manner that many do not have today. Bishop loved Jacopo and trusted him with the end of his life.
To learn more about Dr. Annese’s brain library project and research, watch “Health Matters: Your Own Personal Brain Map.” Thank you to Bettie Spangler for sharing her husband’s inspiring story with out UCTV audience.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around the idea of an ever-expanding universe. But that’s what this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics did back in 1998. Using the best tools and minds that science has to offer, two distinct teams of scientists, one led by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and University of California Berkeley Professor Saul Perlmutter, arrived at the same conclusion — that the universe is not only expanding, it’s accelerating.
In addition to Professor Perlmutter at the Supernova Cosmology Project, the other half of this prestigious prize was awarded jointly to Brian P. Schmidt atAustralian National University and Adam G. Riess at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute. You can find the official announcement from the Nobel Prize organization here.
In January 2010, UCTV premiered a program from Lawrence Berkeley Lab featuring Saul Perlmutter, along with his colleagues Alexie Leauthaud of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics and David Schlegel of Baryon Oscillation Spectroscope Survey, in a public conversation about the suspected cause of the universe’s accelerated expansion, dark energy, an elusive force that remains science’s biggest unsolved mystery. You can watch the program or download and audio or video podcast file here:
Today, NASA announced the discovery of ”dark, finger-like features” on Mars that could very well indicate the existence of flowing salt water on the red planet. The time-lapse series of images, taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), shows what looks like a seasonal ebb and flow. Whatever it is, the discovery is enough to excite the imagination of even the most science-phobic citizen. Of course, this news comes only a few weeks after the final space shuttle mission, and more potential cutbacks in federally funded research.
Still, we’re compelled to explore and uderstand the universe that surrounds us. That’s certainly the case for Steven Squyres, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University and the principle scientist behind the Mars Exploration Rover Project, who made his UCTV debut this summer after a busy trip to UC Berkeley sharing his experiences and thoughts on the future of planetary exploration.
If the prospect of water on Mars floats your boat, then make sure to tune in to these programs featuring Professor Steven Squyres:
